To paraphrase an old proverb about justice, “the wheels of Em Software development turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.”

It’s been a very long time since we’ve released any news about our XTensions for QuarkXPress 10 under Mac OS X—the Windows port was done mid-last-year—, mostly because we had no good news to share. We’re a small 4-man company, severely engineering-resource-limited (there’s really only one engineer who could do the work, Chris Roueche). The QuarkXPress 10 Mac OS XTension porting work loomed as a mountain we couldn’t really start climbing until we had cleared away some major obligations (the ports involved converting all code from Carbon to Cocoa, which is a serious change). We kept having to make tough engineering resource decisions over the past year that we judged the best for our customers overall. The end result of those decisions was a major delay affecting some of our QuarkXPress customers, and we’re sorry for that.

Chris was able to start the porting work in earnest this year, and so we’re very happy to show concrete porting progress in the release of Xtags 3.8.4 for QuarkXPress 10 under OS X.

Our current best estimate is that Xdata for QuarkXPress 10 OS X will be available by mid-March, with Xcatalog (the largest of the ports, due to its relatively large user interface) to follow a few weeks later.

The good news is that, once these ports are done, there shouldn’t be any more serious mountains to climb for future releases of QuarkXPress.

As a case in point, we’re also simultaneously producing versions of these XTensions for QuarkXPress 2015, which is due in late March, according to Quark. If you’d like to test our prerelease versions of Xtags—and perhaps Xdata if we hit our target—under the QuarkXPress 2015 beta, please contact support, and we’ll put you in touch with the Quark 2015 beta test folks (who will require you to join their beta program under NDA, so only ask if you’re serious).

The second, at Catalogs and Circulars: Limitless Design Flexibility, has the caption Mike Docker, Deputy Production Editor at Caterer & Hotelkeeper Magazine, said these guides involved a lot of coding at first but using Em Software’s Xdata XTension for QuarkXPress paid dividends for years afterwards.

(In both cases, you have to click on the embedded picture to see the samples.)

Quark announced recently that QuarkXPress 9 is set to ship on April 26th (later this month), with a “test drive” version available until then on the Quark web site.

We’re delighted to announce that the 9.x versions of our XTensions–compatible with the final QuarkXPress 9 release–are now available from the right sidebar of this post, and from the respective product pages.

This version of QuarkXPress looks to have a tremendous set of new features and improvements, and should be a must-have upgrade for anyone who wants to build e-books or make mobile apps from QuarkXPress content. This new version also catches up to its main competitor in various ways: conditional styles, bullets and numbering, callouts, story editing, etc.

One of the new features of QuarkXPress 9 that greatly improves our products is the new anchored-table-breaking ability. This means you’ll be able to create anchored tables in Xdata that break automatically over column or page boundaries.